Re:Employee motivation ideas for managers and leaders
by mettamage on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @05:06PM
(#22950184)
Here are some employee motivation ideas that I know that work:
Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan lumps everything into three components:
- The ability to make decisions / agency over what you do (they call this autonomy)
- Feeling connected with other people (relatedness)
- Being able to get better and to start at the right level (they call this competence)
Any idea that you can think of that relates to CAR (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness) will most likely work.
Here are a few:
- Relatedness: Say you want to learn mathematics. Find a study group for 2 hours per week! Don't like your study group? Find a study group until you like one. Can't find someone, then at least get your social media straight: find mathematicians you like on YouTube, Twitter and the like. Email them, ask them questions, who cares they're busy? Consume their content (isn't 3Blue1Brown motivating? ;-) ) and see if you can engage more with them.
- Competence: You're too long stuck at a problem and you feel demotivated. Well the theory predicts that, so you need to find a way to see your progress. Either do this by getting easier problems to solve or get better feedback mechanisms. One way to do that is to reflect after the fact (when you solved the problem) how it is possible to be stuck for so long. Then the next time you get stuck, you can include this meta-process and reflect on it again, over time you'll see yourself get better with this reflection. So now you get feedback from two things that are relating to each other!
- Autonomy: Do you feel forced to do something? Try to see if you can find a choice within the activity. I did this while studying, I chose to study "how to study as fast as possible", suddenly I found any topic fascinating. This is why managers forcing a certain work style down employees their throats are hurting their intrinsic motivation. Allowing employees to find out about their own ways of working yields higher autonomy.
I'm always noticing that when I'm unmotivated that I'm sorely lacking in one of these three aspects, and in most cases it's relatedness as I have no one to bounce my ideas around with.
So ask yourself when you're really unmotivated, are you low on competence, autonomy or relatedness? I'm curious to hear if you feel high on all three (email is in the profile). I never experienced it.
Anyways, those are my tips to motivate anyone really.
Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan lumps everything into three components:
- The ability to make decisions / agency over what you do (they call this autonomy)
- Feeling connected with other people (relatedness)
- Being able to get better and to start at the right level (they call this competence)
Any idea that you can think of that relates to CAR (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness) will most likely work.
Here are a few:
- Relatedness: Say you want to learn mathematics. Find a study group for 2 hours per week! Don't like your study group? Find a study group until you like one. Can't find someone, then at least get your social media straight: find mathematicians you like on YouTube, Twitter and the like. Email them, ask them questions, who cares they're busy? Consume their content (isn't 3Blue1Brown motivating? ;-) ) and see if you can engage more with them.
- Competence: You're too long stuck at a problem and you feel demotivated. Well the theory predicts that, so you need to find a way to see your progress. Either do this by getting easier problems to solve or get better feedback mechanisms. One way to do that is to reflect after the fact (when you solved the problem) how it is possible to be stuck for so long. Then the next time you get stuck, you can include this meta-process and reflect on it again, over time you'll see yourself get better with this reflection. So now you get feedback from two things that are relating to each other!
- Autonomy: Do you feel forced to do something? Try to see if you can find a choice within the activity. I did this while studying, I chose to study "how to study as fast as possible", suddenly I found any topic fascinating. This is why managers forcing a certain work style down employees their throats are hurting their intrinsic motivation. Allowing employees to find out about their own ways of working yields higher autonomy.
I'm always noticing that when I'm unmotivated that I'm sorely lacking in one of these three aspects, and in most cases it's relatedness as I have no one to bounce my ideas around with.
So ask yourself when you're really unmotivated, are you low on competence, autonomy or relatedness? I'm curious to hear if you feel high on all three (email is in the profile). I never experienced it.
Anyways, those are my tips to motivate anyone really.